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Moore’s law formulator bets on 10 more years

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Co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, has said that his infamous "law" should hold out for another 10 years without too much trouble. Moore's Law, which is more of a media creation than a law per se, says that transistor count in CPUs will double (at least) every two years. Skeptics have been squinting for the death of the law for quite some time, but integrated circuit technology keeps marching on (miraculously).

Moore, 74, the creator of "Moore's Law," told a meeting of many of the world's preeminent chip designers that engineers must concentrate on overcoming power leakage and reducing heat levels as more and more circuits are crammed closer together. "No physical quantity can continue to change exponentially forever," he cautioned. "Your job is delaying forever." [...] The number of transistors on a single chip has grown 300 million-fold since Intel introduced its first microprocessor 35 years ago. That represents a performance increase of about 80 percent per year. [Moore] compared transistors to the number of ants crawling around the world. Meanwhile, the cost has dropped from $1 per transistor in 1968 to $1 per 50 million transistors now, he said.

Will we see CPUs with 672,000,000 transistors in 2010? Perhaps, but some major breakthroughs will be needed, plus good old fashioned market drive. Does the desktop arena need more than games to fuel such rapid growth for the future?

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher